


Take me home

by vaguely_concerned



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Everybody Lives, First Time, M/M, Nanite!team, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-14
Updated: 2016-08-14
Packaged: 2018-08-08 17:14:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7766434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vaguely_concerned/pseuds/vaguely_concerned
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The cloned versions of the team and Elizabeth from 'This Mortal Coil' didn’t actually die at the end of the episode, and now they have to come to terms with their new lives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Take me home

Rodney didn’t know how long he’d been working when his rumbling stomach finally jolted him out of it, but the kink in his back told him it’d been longer than planned. With a wince he straightened up, vertebrae giving disconcerting cracks.

He glanced out the window to see that the unrelenting lead gray of the sky outside had started to darken around the edges, which meant someone was probably working on dinner back in the main hall. Rubbing at his face, he closed the laptop he’d been using and disconnected it from the creative system of wires and clamps he’d set up to let it draw electricity from the strangely shaped outlets in the metal walls. Whatever culture had originally built this place had left some of their own technology behind, which had been a big help in figuring out how they’d had the power system organized. The generators still chugged along pretty reliably. He’d fried his tablet on his first attempt to charge it, of course, but every day in every way and so on.

Sheppard’s chair - the one he’d been sitting in pretty much every day for months, pestering Rodney while he tried to save their lives with science - was empty today. He wasn’t sure when it had become _Sheppard’s_ chair, but there you were. It looked slightly mournful now, which was a silly thing to think. Rodney rolled his eyes at himself and got up.  

He let the door of the science building creak open and tentatively stuck his head outside to find that it was still raining cats and dogs out there. He groaned - the main hall wasn’t that far away, but he was still going to be soaked through by the time he got there. Throwing a look behind him to make sure everything in the big circular room was left in a proper state, he curled his shoulders up towards his ears and sprinted across the courtyard. The surrounding buildings stood gravely around him, rain tinkling against their rounded metal roofs. They huddled like a cluster of silvery mushrooms around the towering hemisphere of the main hall.

By the time he’d reached the heavy doors and managed to fumble them open, his shoulders and hair were uncomfortably damp, and the warmth of the room inside felt especially welcoming.

“Hello, Rodney,” Teyla said from over by the fireplace. “You have arrived just in time, the food is ready.”

“Ah, that’s my spidey senses at work, then,” Rodney said. He sat down heavily on the nearest wooden bench and wiped raindrops off his forehead.

“Practically your super power,” Ronon agreed. “Able to sense a sandwich being made from fifty miles away.”

“Sheppard never should have introduced you to comics,” Rodney said. “It’s not good for you. Makes the imagination run wild.”

Ronon shrugged unconcernedly and made that sweeping hand gesture Rodney had suspected of being the Satedan equivalent of flipping the bird, then handed Rodney a stack of plates to set out on the table.  

The food was pretty good - Teyla’s culinary prowess was definitely improving, even if Ronon was still by far the best cook between them once he got the inspiration. The last few days, though, he’d been in a weird sulky mood, pacing over the floor like a caged tiger and then going off to... Rodney didn’t actually know, but from the grim sweaty satisfaction on his face when he came back he was probably wrestling the local wildlife or breaking boulders with his bare hands or something like that.

Maybe it was the rain getting to him, like it had seemed to do to Sheppard.

They ate mostly in silence, though Elizabeth did try to break it now and then to ask if anyone had done something exciting that day.

“We’ve been on this planet for three months now,” Ronon said eventually.

Teyla turned her head towards him quizzically.

“Um, yeah?” Rodney said. “And?”

“So what are we going to do? How long are we going to just sit here and twiddle our thumbs?”

“I only solved the problem of making our nanites untraceable a couple of weeks ago, don’t expect me to have a miracle up my sleeve every Wednesday like magical clockwork.”

“It’s stupid that we’re just stuck here,” Ronon muttered. “What’s the point of having these bodies if we’re just going to sit around doing nothing? We should use the upper hand these nanites give us, find some wraith, make a difference.”

“Hey, don’t get cocky,” Rodney said. “You might seem indestructible right now, but one day the nanites are going to run out of steam and suddenly that great big gaping hole in your stomach isn’t going to just repair itself. Until I find some reliable way to recharge them, anyway,” he added grudgingly.

Ronon pointed at him with his chicken leg - or at least unidentified chicken-like bird leg - as if to say ‘See? Only a question of time’, then went back to his plate.

“I must agree with Rodney,” Teyla said from where she was sitting near the fireplace. “I think it would be wise to draw as little attention to ourselves as possible for the time being. If the Replicators _or_ the people of Atlantis find out we did not perish as they thought, things could get very... awkward.”

They all turned to Elizabeth, who was staring out the window with a drawn look on her face. When she noticed they were looking at her she shook her head slightly, as if to clear it. “Hm,” she said. “Well, I definitely think we’re best served with lying low for a while, until we’ve got a better understanding of our situation. Staying here forever isn’t a viable option either, though - when the winter comes it’ll be harder to keep up a steady food supply.”

“I can hunt. If we have to, we can manage,” Ronon said gruffly.

Elizabeth smiled at him. “I am sure we can, but I’d rather not put it to the test. We don’t really know how significant the seasonal changes are going to be, and I’m not keen on finding out the hard way. For all we know that’s why the original inhabitants of this planet left.”

Ronon made a noncommittal sound and gnawed disconsolately on the chicken leg.

What Rodney wasn’t quite ready to admit to was that finding this place had been a stroke of uncanny luck, one that they couldn’t expect again. Of course there were numerous planets with signs of higher civilization that now lay empty, thanks to the wraith and the general instability of the Pegasus galaxy, but this settlement had been remarkably well preserved. Everything stood whole and perfect, as if the inhabitants had just gotten up one day and left with no fuss whatsoever. Once Rodney had given the generators a little TLC and a well-placed kick, they even had limited amounts of electricity.

He was loathe to relinquish the safety and stability of this place at a moment’s notice, especially after all those weeks in the jumper he’d only barely managed to cobble together again after the crash. Closing your eyes and begging that the next trip through a stargate wouldn’t rip your ship to pieces and expose you all to the vacuum of space was not his idea of a good time.

Besides the place was pretty cool. The people who used to live here apparently put their beds up in the loft-like space between the wooden beams and the metal ceiling, where skylights and the heat rising from the fireplace below made for a pretty light and cozy spot. Once Rodney had gotten over his - totally reasonable - concerns about falling off the edge despite the solid railing that ran all the way around, he found that he liked it a lot. When they divvied up the buildings between them, he’d managed to secure himself one with a phenomenally spacious double bed through a patented mix of vague threats and pestering Sheppard until he gave in. After years in the ridiculous Ancient beds it was an unspeakable luxury.

Well. He, _personally_ , as a separate physical entity, had probably not spent more than a few nights in those Ancient beds, in the Replicators’ fake city. He didn’t know how far along the experiment had been when they figured it out and made their sorti, but Rodney had realized early on that in all likelihood he was less than two weeks old at the time. That was the kind of thought that could send a lesser man spiralling into existential madness, but Rodney found some measure of solace in the fact that even if the physical reality of himself and the Ancient beds - every bed he ever remembered sleeping in - were ultimately false, his memories of backaches past definitely weren’t, and that had to count for something.

Sometimes he was very grateful that he didn’t have a particularly philosophical disposition. He had a feeling it would clash with his life style.

“Where’s Sheppard, by the way?” he asked, looking around.

There was a long silence. “Was he not with you?” Teyla said finally.

“Would I be asking if he was?” Rodney sighed, then held up his hands in apology when Teyla raised an unimpressed eyebrow.

“I haven’t seen him since this morning,” Ronon said, shrugging. “I thought the same thing, though - he said he was going to check on you.”

For some reason Rodney felt a cold fear settle in the pit of his stomach at that. “Oh,” he said, putting down his cutlery. “Hm. Well, I didn’t see him. Maybe someone should go tell him it’s dinner.”

“He knows the mealtimes,” Elizabeth said mildly. And that sounded very... very sensible, very logical, John was a grown man who presumably knew to turn up for dinner, but...

“I’ll go tell him anyway,” Rodney said, standing up a little too quickly. They all looked at him weirdly. He would probably have been puzzled at himself too, if he’d been them; he wasn’t quite sure why he was feeling so adamant about this. John had skipped quite a few meals since they’d gotten here, just as he’d sometimes done on Atlantis when things got hectic.

“If you feel it’s necessary,” Elizabeth said, waving her fork idly.

“If you’re not back in half an hour, can I have your food?” Ronon said. “Be a shame to let it get cold.”

Rodney sighed. “Sure,” he said, taking his jacket from the row of clothes hooks beside the door and shrugging it on. When he cracked the door open he grimaced at the brush of chill rainy air across his face.

He made his way towards the building that served as John’s quarters - the same round-roofed metal hut as the rest of them, just on the outskirts of the settlement. Rodney still hadn’t figured out how the people here had made them, because the outer structure seemed to be cast in one continuous piece of metal, no sign of fusing or bolts, and when you knocked your knuckles against the walls it made a hollow sound. That made sense; you probably needed some way to sneak insulation into the space between the inner and outer walls to make a metal house inhabitable in winter. It did not explain how the interiors were all made out of wood, or what kind of crazy alloy these people had hit on to make a metal dome strong and light enough to stand up on its own like that. Somewhere out there an experimental architect had probably just popped a boner and didn’t even know why.

Rodney knocked on the door. “Sheppard, are you there?” There was complete silence from in there, no matter how much he strained his ears. “I’m gonna open the door, okay?”

He pushed the door open and glanced inside. There weren’t any lights on, but the sparse illumination  from the skylight was enough to establish that it was empty. The room looked as naked and unlived in as John’s Atlantis quarters had sometimes done, a sleeping bag the only discernible sign of life. Just to be sure he climbed up to the loft and then checked the bathroom - John was nowhere to be found.

As a last resort he tried his radio, but it was useless; they’d all turned them off to save the batteries for emergencies, and he got nothing more than static.

He stood in the middle of the floor with a strange feeling fluttering against the inside of his rib cage, like a kid who realizes he’s lost his parents in the middle of a big store.

The logical thing, of course, would be to go and tell the others, and they’d all look for him. He’d probably be somewhere close by and it was all a big misunderstanding, he’d changed his mind about Rodney’s lab and gone off to... chop some wood or something, nothing sinister about it at all.

Rodney, usually logic’s number one fan, found himself unconvinced.

Going outside and looking around, he tried to recall if John had said or done anything out of the ordinary lately. Well, not really. He’d been quieter than usual, and whenever he’d come into the lab he would just sit there silently as opposed to bugging Rodney about what he was doing and being a general nuisance. (Then again quite a few of Rodney’s greatest breakthroughs had been a direct result of trying to explain to John Sheppard how his questions were horribly, monumentally misguided, and sometimes he brought coffee, so in the end it all worked out, one felt.)

Okay, so maybe he _had_ noticed that something was off, but this was John. What happened in his head was an enigma wrapped in a mystery topped by spectacularly messy hair at the best of times.

There were footprints, still recognizable but muddled from the pouring rain, heading off for the rocky hills to the east of the settlement. Rodney’s heart sank.

“Sheppard?” he called, but of course there was no other answer than his own voice echoing back at him from the hills. The footprints must have been left here hours ago.

For a minute he stood at the bottom of the hill, cold water sloshing over his boots. Then, after conscientiously turning on his radio, he started following them.

The footsteps got harder to follow as the ground gave away more and more to bare rock. A couple of times he lost the trail completely before noticing some down-trodden heather and finding it again. Fine, maybe he should have told the others. Ronon could probably track anything with a nonchalant sniff of the breeze, and it would have beaten staggering ever uphill without even being sure he was headed in the right direction. He knew just enough of the geography of the area that he wasn’t going to accidentally step off one of the rock ledges on the steeper sides of the hill, but that was pretty much it.

The rain ran in rivulets between the rocks, splashing icily against Rodney’s fingers every time he had to fling an arm out to steady himself. The wind whipped into the dips and crevasses of the landscape with unrelenting ferocity, and if Rodney hadn’t known his nanites were taking care of it he’d be seriously concerned about hypothermia right now.

He heaved himself up and over the edge to stand on the flatter top of the hill. The view went on for miles in all directions, plains stretching out into the horizon under the heavy grey sky, but there was no sign of John.

“Sheppard!” His voice was carried off by the wind. It was probably no use.   

He followed the trail through the heather again, walking along the ridge of the hill and wondering what the hell anyone would want up here. There was nowhere in particular to go from here except back down.

...there was nothing the way John’s footsteps were heading except the sheer drop of a cliff wall. Rodney’s feet picked up the pace all by themselves.

The wind tugged at him as he walked - ran, really - and by now he was soaking wet, but he had a nasty feeling that that wasn’t why a chill kept shuddering down his spine.

“Sheppard,” Rodney shouted again, scrambling over a boulder, scraping his knuckles and feeling the tickle of the skin healing itself immediately,  “Sheppard! _John_ , are you -” His blood thundered in his ears, almost loudly enough that he didn’t catch the “Over here” from behind a rock overhang.

“Thank you,” Rodney said quietly, to no one in particular. He repeated it one more time and went over to where John’s voice had come from.

John was sitting at the edge, huddled into his clothes in a way that gave Rodney flashbacks to those first months in Atlantis - as if he was freezing right under the skin and just couldn’t get warm. His legs were dangling over the nothingness beneath like it was the edge of the south pier, as if the slightest imbalance wouldn’t topple him down towards the distant rocky ground.

“There you are,” Rodney exclaimed, finally letting the metallic taste of blood in his mouth perturb him. “What the hell did you think you were doing? I’ve been looking all over for you! I thought - I almost... “

He put his hands on his thighs and leaned forward to wheeze a little - sadly the nanites didn’t do away with stitches.

John stared at him, looking honestly confused at Rodney’s agitation.

“...I thought you’d gotten lost or fallen down or something.”

John lifted his eyebrows in surprise, then flicked a lazy look down at the chasm beneath his feet. “What, you think falling from up here would do it? Those nanites are stubborn little fuckers, I’m pretty sure they’d be up to the whole... jigsaw puzzle.”

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Rodney hissed, grabbing John’s shoulder. “I am wet, I am tired, I have multiple phantom aches in all my self-healing scratches and I scaled more rocks today than I have since they threw me out of the Scouts, and I thought you - I thought -”

He collapsed down next to John, hands just flopping down into his lap in his exhaustion. Sheppard looked surprisingly good for someone who had apparently taken a recent turn for the hermit lifestyle, cheeks pinkened from the whipping wind. “Sorry,” Sheppard said, looking taken aback and slightly tinged with guilt. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to worry... I just had to be alone for a while.”

“Could you consider leaving a note about that next time?” Rodney said, breathing slowly evening out. “Because nanites or no, I don’t think my heart is going to survive a lot more hikes like that.”

“Sorry,” Sheppard repeated quietly.

Rodney didn’t know how to ask what needed asking.

“I realized the other night that we’re probably never going to see the city again,” John said, answering anyway.

Rodney’s next breath came in a little askew. “Yeah,” he said after a while. “I know.”   

Some nights he still startled awake because he couldn’t hear the ocean outside his window. He’d heard the platitude about how you could never go home again, he’d just never expected it to be so literal.

“The city was… I’ve never…” John said falteringly, a valiant attempt coming from him.

“Yeah,” Rodney agreed. It stung so much worse than the realization they were kind of slapdash copies of the real things; it was infinitely easier to be a freak of science than to be created into exile from the only home that had ever mattered. He missed the smell of it, and its lights, and the sheer wonder of impossibility it held.

“I keep wanting to go home and then I remember…it’s not anymore. Not mine, anyway.”

John kept looking down into the distant ground for a while until his head tipped back and he closed his eyes. Raindrops clung to his eyelashes and trickled down the bare line of his throat, down to where his t-shirt was clinging wetly to his skin. He looked too stark against the grey sky, like a real thing dropped into a black and white film.

Rodney glared at his profile, stomach churning, water periodically dripping from his hair down to his nose and into his eyes. “Don’t even think about giving up now,” he said. “If you’re not with me in this, I won’t know what to do with myself. Do you understand?”

John turned to him for an impossibly long second, then glanced away, down to his hands where they lay abandoned in his lap. “I know, Rodney,” he said finally. “I know.”

“Well, that’s… good. Awesome.”

After a while John added, in his offhanded teasing tone: “I mean, who else would stop you from blowing up another solar system?”

Rodney groaned. “You’re never going to let me forget about that, are you? It’s going to be inscribed on my gravestone. ‘Here lies Dr. Rodney McKay, universal genius. Saved John Sheppard’s ungrateful butt too many times to count. May have accidentally exploded a few _uninhabited_ planets along the way, but hey, nobody’s perfect, how about forgive and forget’.”

“Hey, my butt is plenty grateful.”

“Good to know.”

There was a defused moment of silence before John scrunched up his nose at him. “You’re taking this whole thing uncharacteristically calmly, by the way.”

“I’m a high-strung hypochondriac with anxiety issues coming out of my ears,” Rodney said flatly. “Sometimes it’s a relief when something bad actually happens, because at least it does away with the suspense. Besides, I’m still me, in all the ways that count, which I’d say gives us better odds than being pretty much anyone else even with the nanites - actually, the nanites mean I don’t have worry about cancer or tetanus or arsenic poisoning or, I don’t know, scurvy? I’m not sure I ever actually worried about scurvy but now it’s definitely off the list, and I’ve -” he tried to rack his brain for a way to say ‘I’ve still got you guys’ that was less embarrassing, then shrugged again and said, “I’ve still got you guys.”

John’s face crumpled, so Rodney looked another way for a minute until he trusted his own expression again.

“Yeah, you’re right,” John muttered.

“Well, duh.”

John made a short sound that still managed to convey sarcasm, but Rodney decided to let him get away with it under the highly damp and freezing circumstances.

“What was that about getting thrown out of the Scouts?” John asked eventually.

Rodney grimaced. “Uh, Jimmy Schmidt bet me that I couldn’t make explosives with the stuff in the barracks.”

John snorted. “Jimmy Schmidt wasn’t the sharpest Swiss Army Knife in the toolbox, I take it.”

“There was a bit of an enormous local forest fire,” Rodney sighed. “It was on the news. To be honest I think Mr. Marston had just been looking for an excuse to send me home ever since I got there. Said I was a ‘pugnacious element’.”

“I’ll have to remember that one,” John said, the corner of his eyes crinkling with understated amusement.

Rodney waved him away. “Pffft, please, I’m an excellent team player when the team doesn’t suck. Besides,” he added, over John’s frankly insulting sounds of doubt, “I didn’t want to be there any more than Mr. Marston wanted to keep me. And my eyebrows did grow back after a while, so all in all I took it as a win.”

John let out a little laugh and _this_ Rodney had never been _that_ kid - the one who’d been sullenly wiping his sooty face clean with a handkerchief on the car trip home while his dad drove in stony silence - but John’s laughter stretched back through his past and in the end, yeah, he _was_ still Rodney McKay, in all the ways that counted.

After a while John said: “We should head back.”

He pushed to his feet and offered Rodney his hand. Rodney took it and got up too, wincing at how cold John’s hands were.

“Jeez, do you even have _any_ circulation?” he asked, holding John’s palm between his own. Within seconds it occurred to him that that was probably a weird thing to do, but John seemed entirely unfazed and didn’t pull back, so Rodney warmed his hand until it felt less like an ice cube.

“When I was a kid I used to sneak up on my mom and put my hands on her stomach or something to make her squeak.”

Rodney snorted and grabbed John’s other hand. He’d never heard John talk about his mother before. “Of course you did.”

“Well, she was the one who taught me that trick,” John said, looking down at their hands. Rodney cleared his throat and gave John’s now-pinkening knuckles a little pat before letting go.

“I hope you’ve got a better idea of how to get back down than I do,” he said. “Oh wait. I forgot that you have the sense of direction of a deaf and concussed bat, never mind.”

“Screw you, McKay,” John said amicably, shoving his hands into his pockets.

“You’re not going to go all lemming on me and lead us out over a cliff edge, are you - ow.” Rodney laughed and steadied himself from John bumping him with his shoulder.

“Less talking, more walking,” John advised, slouching his way through the heather.

John was quiet on the way back, but it was a busy kind of quiet. Rodney figured he could practically see the cogwheels spinning around in his head. Well, maybe not cogwheels, that would imply that his mind worked along some actual logical lines, and while Rodney had grudgingly realized within the first few months on Atlantis that John was, despite all appearances, one of the least infuriatingly stupid people in the city under all that hair, it was not a kind of intelligence Rodney could follow along with most of the time. It seemed to work on the basis of brief instances of dazzling insight followed by long periods of phenomenal, near-hibernating levels of laziness. You’d go weeks without a sensible word out of his mouth, and then he suddenly posed one simple question that cascaded into an avalanche of brilliance and saved the day. It baffled Rodney no end. Maybe that was the point.

Every now and then Rodney would feel like he was being watched, but every time he turned his head to look John was staring straight ahead. Weird.

  

\------

 

Elisabeth was still sitting at the table in the main hall when they entered, writing something on a piece of paper with her Serious Organizer face on. When they came in she looked up and lifted her eyebrow.

“You found him, then,” Elizabeth said, tipping her head at them dripping all over the floor.

“Eventually,” Rodney confirmed, as John pulled off his jacket.

“We were about to go looking for you.” She looked them up and down. “I’d ask what the hell you’ve been up to, but....”

“You know better by now, we know,” John said easily, wringing out his sleeve and hanging his jacket up close to where there were still embers in the hearth.  

“Indeed I do.” She studied both their faces intently and must have been reassured by what she found there, because she shook her head and smiled, in that way that always made Rodney feel like he was back in primary school. “Well, if everyone’s present and accounted for, I guess I can finally go to bed.”

“I turned the heat up in your room,” Rodney said absently as he hung his jacket next to John’s. “Since you were complaining about your feet being  too cold? I’m trying to work out an interface so you can adjust the temperature yourself, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. It’s kind of fiddly.”

She smiled and patted his arm, startling him. “Thank you, Rodney. It was nice of you to think about it.”

“Oh, it was nothing,” Rodney said, caught between feeling pleased and, like always with her, wondering if he was being subjected to some sneaky positive reinforcement technique. He eyed her hand on his arm suspiciously. “The work of a moment.”

She gave his arm a parting pat and yawned behind her hand. “Then I appreciate that moment. Good night, both of you. Try to get some warmth back, you could catch a cold from this.”

Rodney was about to explain that the nanites would protect them from infectious diseases, but then Elizabeth walked out the door and, like always these days, he felt a small pang of irrational panic as it closed behind her.

It had been months now of having her back, but he still remembered mourning her.

John shook his head like a wet dog, his hair falling into his eyes. Rodney tried to decide if the feeling in his stomach was hunger or something else.

“I think there’s some dinner left, unless Ronon’s had the munchies again,” he said, then went and looked. He sighed deeply. “Nope, it’s all gone. We’ve got some of those small purple fruits Teyla found, though.”

“It’s okay, I’m not hungry.”

“Suit yourself,” Rodney said and grabbed a couple of the fruits for himself. They tasted a little like tart pears, but more… melony, with an inexplicable hint of hazelnut. At least it wasn’t tava beans.

John sat down at the table with his back to the hearth, almost lost to the shadows in the low light. Without Elisabeth the silence grew heavier, more comprehensive; it felt like the quiet was handing him a test and he was flunking it. He walked around a little, straightening the stack of dishes and reordering the contents of their cupboard into a more logical order. The presence of John took up too much space in his field of perception, suddenly - which was weird, because over the years John and the rest of the team had become the comfortable background noise of his life. It was like how you never noticed that your home had a particular smell until after you’d been away for a while.

John picked up a braided armband left on the table - Teyla’s, Rodney was pretty sure. “Do you think Teyla is… you know. Unhappy here?”

Rodney wandered over and studied the armband over John’s shoulder. It did look vaguely Athosian to his untrained eye, with wooden beads carved in delicate shapes threaded into it. “Huh?  Uh, I haven’t noticed anything, I suppose, but I haven’t exactly been looking out for it. Why?”

John shrugged. “I guess it just feels like she’s missing someone.”

Rodney wrinkled his nose doubtfully. “Like who? Zelenka? Lorne? God forbid, as if her own mother would miss her, Cadman? I mean, it’s not as though she left a secret boyfriend behind or anything. Right?”

“Right,” John said slowly, putting down the armband.

“We’re not completely oblivious. We would have noticed. She’s on our _team_.”

“Riiiight.”

“Well, I would, anyway,” Rodney muttered. He totally would. Wouldn’t he? He stared at the pear as if it had answers.

John shook his head, shrugging the subject off. “Yeah, doesn’t matter, I suppose. She’d tell us if she wanted us to know.”

“...yeah.”

After a while Rodney said: “Bedtime, then?” because he couldn’t find anything better.

“Sure,” John said, getting up. It had stopped raining outside - probably just for a few minutes, but still.

They paused by Rodney’s door, an expectant silence falling between them.

“So, uh, this is me,” Rodney said, waving vaguely.

“Yeah,” John said.  

The air was full of a tension Rodney didn’t understand, like the whole universe was right on the brink of a thunderstorm.

Rodney cleared his throat and unlocked the door, pushing it open. A stripe of golden light fell over the porch.

John’s voice came suddenly, like it had escaped while he looked the other way. “Wait. Rodney.”

“Hm?” Rodney looked over his shoulder.

John shifted restlessly from one foot to another. “Can I come in?”

Rodney turned to him, but John’s face was only a knife edge of paleness in the shadows, impossible to read. “What?”

John stood completely still all of a sudden, like a wild animal noticing the oncoming headlights. “Can I... can I come with you?”

Rodney first thought was “Come where? I’m just going to bed,” and his second was, “Oh wait, he knows that too,” and his third was “Oh”.

_Oh._

He heard his voice as if from far away. “I... yeah, okay, of course. I mean, if you want to...?”

After a few seconds John stepped a little closer, far enough into the light that Rodney could see his eyes gone dark and wide.

John reached out a hand with a look on his face that said he wasn’t at all sure what he was doing, but he wasn’t about to stop, either. His hand was still slightly chilled against Rodney’s cheek.

There are some moments of your life that happen in perfect symmetry, like carbon hitting on just the right kind of pressure and heat to become diamond - the essence of something so perfectly captured by your mind that it transforms into something near unbreakable. Rodney had accumulated a few of those in his life, and he had to admit most of them hadn’t been worth it. At twelve, his fingers leaving the keys of the piano like they’d all ironically turned into locks by a few shouted words. At twenty five, Jeannie’s wedding - there’d been cake thrown and words that should never have been said and great aunt Clarabelle’s dentures stuck in the dessert, and all he could really remember from that night was a desperate confusion, resentment, a final decision that people just weren’t his thing and that everyone’d be better off if he stopped trying.

At six, when his mother died.

But if anyone ever searched out the center of him, from now on this was the moment they would find: John coming in from the darkness, reaching out, the plush rainy night around them like the last few notes in a very old song.

John’s lips were soft and tentative, and Rodney’s eyes slid closed as he tilted his head, fitted their mouths together, a careful move of exploration. Rodney made a small sound, putting his hand on John’s shoulder and then sliding it up to his neck, brushing his thumb through the hair just behind John’s ear. They moved apart a little, just breathing against each other’s mouths.

Rodney grinned and pushed their noses together, and John’s breath caught for a moment before he pushed back, his hand flexing uncertainly against Rodney’s cheek. Rodney pulled away to look at him, and whatever John saw in his expression made him bolder, cupping Rodney’s face in both his palms and going for it like he really meant it, not holding back.

It was amazing. It was like getting a lifetime of Christmas presents all at once. He would never need any more gifts after this.

Rodney fumbled behind him for the door handle and laughed a little when he missed and they both almost overbalanced, gently careening into the door frame. John let out a matching breath of laughter, steering them safely inside and closing the door with the toe of his boot.

The door snicked shut behind them and John leaned back against it, pulling Rodney close by the small of his back, sighing and letting his head fall back when Rodney nuzzled in and kissed the side of his neck.

He heard his own name on a hitching breath, just a sigh, and it sent a brilliant tingle through his blood, illogically, ridiculously, because John said his name all the time, ‘ _my_ McKay’, and still it sort of made his heart brim over.

“C’mere,” Rodney mumbled, kissing his mouth again and again.

 

\---

 

Afterwards John’s breath skated hot and comforting against his neck. Rodney bowed his head to kiss the disheveled mess of dark hair, pulling the covers up over John’s shoulder. Inside his head everything was quiet, as if the thundering river of his mind had finally reached the ocean. Atlantis loomed up in his consciousness and for the first time it didn’t hurt like an open wound, just filled his chest with a strange surge of some feeling he couldn’t name but which wasn’t all pain.

He cupped the nape of John’s neck, pleasantly weighed down by the arm resting across his chest. A realization swept over him in one warm wave; when he’d thought about the smell of Atlantis, what he’d really meant was this: the tang of ocean and _John_.

“Your arm is going to fall asleep if you lie on it like that,” he muttered into John’s hair, starting to wriggle away enough for John to extricate the limb in question. Instead he found himself pulled back in, crushed against John’s front. “Yeah, sure, that’s okay too.”

“I’ve wanted that for so long,” John said, his voice muffled because he was speaking squarely to Rodney’s collar bone. Rodney froze.

“Really?”

Apparently all out of emotional oomph after that seven league step, John just pushed his face further into Rodney’s shoulder and didn’t say anything. Rodney could swear John’s cheek felt even warmer against his arm.

“Cool,” Rodney said, combing through the hair at the nape of John’s neck.

The rain drummed distantly against the roof and splashed against the skylight, puddling against the glass like quicksilver.

“How long do you think we’re going to stay here?” John asked, after staying quiet for so long that Rodney had thought he’d fallen asleep.

“Hm? Oh, I don’t know. Until we know what we’re doing next, I guess.”

John made a dissatisfied sound. “We can’t just stay here forever. Ronon would gnaw his own leg off.”

“Mhm. We have some options. I... _might_ have kept a few gate addresses up my sleeve that they don’t know about,” Rodney admitted. “Well, McKay - the other McKay - he probably knows about some of them, but he’s bound to be pretty busy with replicators and wraith and making sure the city doesn’t blow up, that sort of thing. I was going to mention it to Elisabeth once I’d figured out the nanites and done some more research on it. There’s one place I’ve got pegged as an Ancient space port, actually.”

“You mean you could find us a real ship?”

Rodney squinted thoughtfully at the ceiling. “Probably? I mean, that poor puddlejumper isn’t going to last much longer, it’s basically held together by old habit and blind faith at this point, so sooner or later we’d have to… I have a couple of worlds that could be interesting, and when I had a whole city to think of there was never really a lot of time for - but now we’ve got all the time in the world, don’t we?”

John’s face broke into a smile, the sudden, happy-glowy one that brightened his eyes and was so rare that you’d be forgiven for forgetting it even existed. Rodney had done a lot of stupid shit for that smile. Cobbled together Ancient war ships from wreckage, faced terrifying nightmare monsters that killed you in your sleep, committed what probably would have amounted to treason to get them back to Pegasus in time to save Atlantis - once he’d even tried his best to seem genuinely interested while John endeavoured to explain how American football worked, though the free popcorn had been a help there...

Wow. When you looked at it like that, Rodney almost felt like he should have one of his doctorates revoked or something, this was just embarrassing.

John still moved kind of stiffly, like he wasn’t sure what to do or maybe like he didn’t quite know if he was allowed, but the kiss was surprisingly sweet.

“All the time in the world,” John said. “That doesn’t sound half bad, when you put it like that.”

“Right?” Rodney said. “We’d basically be some kind of… benign-ish space pirates. Minus the eyeliner, maybe, I don’t think I could pull off the Jack Sparrow look.”

“This opens up so many opportunities,” John said dreamily.

“Don’t you dare,” Rodney warned.

“Ahoy and shiver me timbers,” John began, in his best growly Robert Newton impression, which was abysmal.

“Oh my god.”

“Be that a piece o’ eight in your pocket, or be ye just happy t’ see me,” John said speculatively. “They… don’t call me Long John because my head is so big?”

Rodney choke-laughed. “What, nothing about jollying rogers?”

John tipped his head on one side, as if acknowledging good craftsmanship.

“Arrr, my new career as a pirate goes swimmingly, seeing as I already found meself a very nice piece of booty,” John said, discreetly squeezing Rodney’s ass. At this point Rodney couldn’t do much more than clutch at John and wheeze for breath. John looked very pleased with himself, rubbing his stubbly cheek over Rodney’s shoulder and neck. He wrapped Rodney in his arms and pulled him closer as the last few hitches of pirate-induced giggles died down, meeting him when Rodney turned his face up for a kiss. Rodney, feeling like this didn’t cut it in terms of how many parts of his body were touching John’s body, flipped them over, looking down at John’s beaming face. He stroked the back of his fingers against John’s eyebrow.

“I,” he said, helplessly, because trying to wrap what he was feeling in words felt like containing a nuclear explosion with tissue paper. “I, uh…”

John caught his hand, twining their fingers together.  

“All the time in the world,” he said, and Rodney smiled.

 

\-------

 

Rodney woke up from a soft kiss being pressed to his shoulder. He smirked with his eyes still closed and turned over to John’s side of the bed, reaching out for him. When his hand found nothing but empty space, he slid his eyes open to find John sitting on the bed, fully dressed and in the process of putting on his shoes.

Rodney stared at him. John stared back, half-way through putting on a boot.

“Uh, sorry,” John said quietly. “I didn’t mean to wake you, you just looked so… and then I had to... yeah.”

“Did you hear me complain?” Rodney looked him up and down. “Where are you going?”

“It’s my turn to make breakfast,” John explained in a whisper.

Rodney blinked. “Why are we whispering?” he whispered back.

John unfroze enough to get his boot on - in his own perpetual unlaced way - and sat on the edge of the bed with his hands in his lap. “You wanna come help me out?” he hedged in a normal voice. “Since you’re awake anyway?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Rodney babbled, fumbling for his clothes were they were crumpled by the side of the bed. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed John’s gaze linger on his ass when he leaned forward to snatch up his socks. Heh.  

They stumbled out into the crisp morning air, the sky high and clear after the rain last night.

Once they got to the kitchen Rodney started boiling water and took out a couple of mugs and a jar. The jar contained the coarse local grass with delusions of teahood that was, depressingly, the closest thing to coffee he was going to get for the foreseeable future. Teyla liked the stuff, but then Teyla also liked vigorous exercise and going for long swims in ice water. People like that were obviously not to be trusted.

John yawned as he picked up stacks of plates and doled out cutlery in a haphazard way. He was almost painfully cute with his sleep-crazy hair and unlaced boots, staggering around the kitchen like a kitten who hasn’t quite figured out the whole legs situation yet. Rodney had once seen Sheppard kill someone with his bare hands; ‘cute’ should not be a word one middle aged man thought about another - and yet here Rodney was, feeling like the silverware and the wobbling salt shaker right after the magician pulled the tablecloth away.

John apparently took Rodney’s look as a question, lifting his eyebrows in response.

“Uh, nothing, sorry,” Rodney said, turning to stare fixedly at the tea jar. A horrible realization had just struck him. He measured out tea like he was just running a subroutine while his mind reeled.

He hadn’t thought about what they’d tell the others - or if John even _wanted_ to tell the others, or, the most humiliating possibility, they totally didn’t need to tell the others because they’d just been that amazingly dense. He made a face at the tea pot. Well, Elisabeth would just _know_ somehow, it was one of her mystical mom-like qualities, alongside guilt tripping and always, _always_ knowing when you were lying even if you’d thoroughly planned out your alibi beforehand. Maybe he should just tell her and save himself the whole earnest ‘it’s good to be open about how you feel, Rodney’ talk. It wasn’t that she was wrong, it was that she had way too much faith in his ability to carry an adult conversation without wanting to jump out a window. He’d make sure her feet wouldn’t be cold anymore, he’d try to make Teyla laugh at least once a day and he’d let Ronon trash talk Batman every now and then - he’d find John the best damn space ship in the galaxy and make out with him as often as at all possible. It seemed a whole lot easier than words, _real_ words, most of the time, and it gave him plausible deniability.  

Ah yes, a new space ship. The only real worry was that the jumper was too banged up to survive the search. Rodney could fix most of the immediate problems, but they were talking band aid overlapping band aid solutions at this point. He frowned as he spooned some sugar into three of the cups - for himself, Elisabeth and Ronon, in ascending order of teeth-rottingly sweet - and went through different scenarios in his head. Some systems were absolutely indispensable, but maybe if he freed up the already ailing invisibility cloak and rerouted some… no, no, no, that would only work if… but maybe. Maybe, if he could find the alloy these people had used for their buildings. Some tests would have to be involved before they flung themselves back into the vacuum of space, but there was real potential there.

“Hey, Sheppard, did you notice anything odd with the jumper when you - gah!” He jumped as two icy hands snaked their way under his shirt and onto his stomach. “You -”

“What?” John said innocently, his thumb idly brushing over Rodney’s skin, which would have been very touching if it hadn’t been the temperature of a glacier. “I’m just being nice.”

Rodney sighed dramatically and leaned his head back against John’s shoulder. “This is what I’ve signed myself up for, isn’t it.”

“Mhm,” John confirmed, pressing a kiss to the side of Rodney’s neck. Rodney reasoned that he’d probably be able to live with it.

“You could have waited, oh, three minutes and I’d have a steaming mug of tea for you to warm your sneaky icicles on.”

John made a dismissive sound and nuzzled his neck, making Rodney shiver and arch back as he teased out a sensible spot. “But would it be as fun? I don’t think so.”

“Well, yes, of course, that’s actually a very valid -”

He used John’s distraction with his neck to flip them around, and John laughed as Rodney crowded him in against the counter and kissed him, his hands shifting from Rodney’s stomach to the small of his back. John’s strong, callused fingers were warming up against his skin, sliding thoughtlessly up under the hem of his t-shirt.

When John moved his fingers up to rub over Rodney’s nipple, Rodney’s hand tightened reflexively in John’s hair and John made a _noise_ , which Rodney filed under ‘VERY INTERESTING’ and ‘TO BE PURSUED’. The thrill of it was like that moment you had an epiphany on a project that had been stagnating for weeks but without the useless frustration preceding it.

John’s mouth softened with a smile, and he left light, lingering kisses against Rodney’s lips, careful like an archaeologist unearthing something precious with those tiny toothbrush things.

There were voices outside - Teyla and Ronon, from the sounds of it. They were bickering amicably about who had won this morning’s sparring session - because they’d been working out since just before dawn because everyone Rodney knew were _crazy_ \- and John pulled back. His eyes were so bright, though, like they’d been when Rodney had shown him the jumpers, like that time they’d decided to sneak out from under the noses of the SGC and take the city back, like every time they found something new and strange and liable to be really cool, possibly dangerous.

It was enough to make a man freak out about the responsibility, really, like people handing you babies and precious heirlooms in the sincere belief that you wouldn’t accidentally drop them or something.

John pressed one last quick kiss to Rodney’s mouth and Rodney blinked dazedly at his face before pulling away, clearing his throat and hurrying to take the kettle off the fire before it boiled over.

During breakfast Rodney off-handedly mentioned something about Long John Silver and peglegs, and John snorted tea through his nose.

**Author's Note:**

> I realized halfway through that this situation is, like, quadruple fucked up for Teyla - I’m pretty sure she’d be pregnant or at least deeply in love at this point, which, ahaha, not any more baby that’s not *your* life to live anymore :’( quick someone clone Kanaan too
> 
> (If you want to write the story where they team up with that cloned SG-1 team - who also totally didn’t die despite ostensibly being BRUTALLY MURDERED on-screen aha ha haaah - and together THEY FIGHT CRIME, there might be a firstborn in it for you, I’m just saying.) 
> 
> Title could be from pretty much anywhere, I know, but in this case it is named after a Tom Waits song.


End file.
